Music: This dense and sometimes frustrating book is welcome, writes Philip King, because, as Smyth says in his introduction, "I wish merely to introduce what I consider to be a crucial aspect of modern Irish experience (popular music) and to indicate in fairly broad strokes some of the ways in which analysis of that practice might contribute to an understanding of the Irish historical condition".
Smyth acknowledges that the work of French philosopher/ economist Jacques Attali underpins the thrust of his study. In the opening of his seminal work Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Attali states that "for 25 centuries, western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent . . . Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise."
In the absence of a "dedicated critical language or tradition for the formal study of popular music as a significant dimension of modern Irish experience - with the exception of studies which tend to be predominantly journalistic in tone or tenor," Smyth in this book sets out to create one, with some degree of success.
Ireland is "the isle full of noise". Noise is informed by records sent from the US (from That's All Right Mama, waxed by Presley at Sun Studios in 1954, to sides of Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, The Carter Family), which influenced the showbands from the Clipper Carlton to the Royal, from the Miami to the Mighty Avons and the Royal Blues, and the recordings of Michael Coleman and James Morrison which left an indelible thumbprint on the development of our tradition. The Moses Asch, Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Ewan MacColl recordings, along with those of The Clancy Brothers made in the States, all kick-started the ballad boom or the folk scene, and gave us Sweeney's Men, The Dubliners, Danny Doyle, Anne Byrne and Jesse Owens. American Forces Network and returning merchant seamen gave us the Maritime club in Belfast, Them and Van Morrison, The Greenbeats, Rory Gallagher and Phil Lynott. These are all influences.
What concerns Smyth is when or how did we develop our own voice, and whether that voice accurately reflects the social circumstances which gave it air; and if noise, as Jacques Attali says, is prophetic. Smyth tells us, for example, that "Irish rock's relationship with the showband scene was essentially oedipal" and that "we may claim that Bono's stage persona owes something, however remote, however improbably it may seem, to the charisma of Brendan Bowyer". In this case, therefore, is Bowyer a herald of the future?
The writer, who has been listening to this subject in one way or the other since the early 1990s, engages with most of the significant popular musicians Ireland has produced. His opening chapter, "From Hucklebuck to Horslips", concludes with the notion that "rock and traditional music had distinctive sonic qualities and ideological resonances in contemporary Irish culture, to each of which Horslips was sentimentally and politically drawn; collectively they maintained a deep interest in Irish cultural history, its legends, its heroes as well as its music. Yet the five men were also children of the rock'n'roll revolution, as familiar with Ray Charles and Captain Beefheart as they were with Carolan and Cú Chulainn".
The section where Smyth explores the subject of the British engagement with Celticism is convincing, clear and well-argued. Smyth refers to "Matthew Arnold's self-appointed task to co-opt Britain's Celtic margins into a peaceful political arrangement with the archipelago's dominant power, England . . . Arnold believed that our 'Celticness', when incorporated into the British racial mix, would help to humanise what he perceived to be the Anglo-Saxons' characteristic gifts for worldliness and pragmatism. Basically, in Arnold's vision, the Celts were ideally suited to entertain the English after a hard day at the Empire."
Our own Celtic flowering grew to prominence as part of the world music New Age marketing wheeze. The Corrs got on board, Riverdance drove the train and Enya, Smyth tells us, "has helped to sell the idea of Irishness as productive of a certain way of viewing the world and of a certain way of responding to the world in music. The fact of the matter is, however, that in the era of the Celtic Tiger, Enya's most distinctive Irish attribute is her commercial success."
In a subchapter entitled "Folk (Con)fusion", he tells us that "Irish music such as it was didn't need to be protected or ring-fenced in the hands of Planxty; it was clearly robust enough and confident enough to take its chances in a noisy world". The Undertones, with songs such as Teenage Kicks, "will not be reduced to the discourse of violence you have introduced into our community; you may discipline our bodies but you cannot discipline our imagination", as the band put it. While Stiff Little Fingers' Alternative Ulster "blatantly used the violence of punk to confront the violence of sectarianism".
Of Moving Hearts, he says that their music represents a significant development in the history of Irish rock music: "Certainly also the band contributed to an idea of musical crossover that has remained an important aspect of Irish popular musical discourse. What the music 'means', above and beyond that, depends on your own political persuasions."
The Blades, like The Jam in Britain, represented something new in Irish popular music history, a pop/rock band that took many of its sonic, sartorial, and semiotic references from punk, says Smyth.
"The Virgin Prunes were a fusion of noise, drama and shock tactics" and "the anger of Geldof and The Boomtown Rats derived in the first instance from the conservative forces that. even after the modernisation of the 1960s, still appeared to be dominating Irish life".
Smyth recognises the primacy of The Pogues - the coming together of the punk, the plastic paddy and the traditional. They were, he says, "as much as any of the musicians invoked throughout this book, always authentic in so much as they explored the interface between technology and ideology wherein Irish musical identity is under constant negotiation."
In a section entitled "No Sleep Till Tuam", Smyth raises what he considers to be one of the most important theoretical/methodological issues attending the studies of popular music in recent years. His guru here is American geographer/philosopher Edward Soja, his band The Saw Doctors. Smyth quotes Kieran Keohane, who tells us that "The Saw Doctors articulate one polarity of the economy of desire in the Irish spirit: the desire to be connected with the local and the familiar". Keohane refers to Saw Doctors' hit N17 as a "nostalgic yearning for an Irish lost Eden of Tuam . . . Such a yearning," he warns, "means that The Saw Doctors flirt with some of the elements of Irish proto-fascist traditionalism, the uncritical value of all that is connoted by blood, race and soil."
Sinead O'Connor's voice is celebrated here, and hers is truly one of the great noises to emanate from Ireland. In it I think we can hear all of what we are about on this noisy island of ours. It's the full emotional rollercoaster; no misty-eyed Celt here. In terms of rock'n'roll, tradition, translation and transmission, Sinead O'Connor has always been, as Jacques Attali says, "a herald of the future".
Two sections of this book are dedicated to U2. Much of the U2 story has been parsed and analysed elsewhere, but Smyth has a clear opinion of U2's significance. "U2's true contribution to Irish life since 1980," he says, "has been largely to do with intangibles such as attitude, self-confidence and atmosphere. It startedoff in a country where failure was endemic; they soundtracked the emergence of a country where success came to be worshipped. Perhaps the band's greatest achievement has been to encourage people to consider the relationship between these Irelands of the mind - what was left behind when the old Ireland was jettisoned and what was gained and lost when the new Ireland was embraced."
By the mid-1990s we have "one of the most managed popular music scenes in the world. In 2001, Irish artists sold over 56 million albums, 2.3 per cent of worldwide CD sales."
Smyth neglects to deal with the significant role of the broadcast media in particular and the significant role played by pirate radio stations, sponsored programmes, and by DJs/producers such as Ken Stewart, Larry Gogan, Dave Fanning, Ian Wilson, Tom Dunne, John Kelly, Ciaran Mac Mathúna, Peter Browne and many others in making much of our music available.
This book is not a light read but there are many interesting ideas raised here, perhaps for the first time. The notes, bibliography and discography (sadly, no mention anywhere of the hugely important Giordai Ó Laoire and Nine Wassies from Báinne) are very useful. It's an interesting first step in bringing a serious critical language to bear on a subject which "is seen by most commentators as a hopelessly corrupt practice lacking a mandate from national history and possessed of nothing original or beautiful to say about the Irish condition".
Philip King is a writer, composer, musician and film producer. He produced the television series Bringing It All Back Home and A River of Sound and is the series editor of Other Voices. He is currently producing a film on the life and music of Thomas Moore.
Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music. By Gerry Smyth, Cork University Press, 182pp. €19.95